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Jing fong upper west side2/2/2024 ![]() “We’re in a part of town that’s more tourist dependent. It’s not just rent, it’s just not neighborhood, it’s not just utilities. And even once restaurants were allowed to partially reopen, the 25 percent occupancy limit has proved difficult to navigate because the restaurant loses its volume and bustle, Lam noted to Gary He on Eater NY, According to a statement posted to the restaurant’s Instagram, Lam will seek to reopen Jing Fong elsewhere, and says in a statement they are “actively and quickly searching.” ![]() Jing Fong shut down on March 12 following Governor Andrew Cuomo’s order prohibiting large gatherings of 500 or more people. “Our type of restaurant, that does dim sum lunches and banquet hall stuff, everybody is struggling and just kind of trying to survive one day at a time.”Īt 800 seats, the restaurant’s size has presented issues since the start of the pandemic. “We are basically running the smallest part of our business, which is delivery, for a year,” he explains. Today, he says sales are down 85 percent, in part because the restaurant’s events business - once half of all sales - has completely evaporated. Last February, Lam said sales were down 25 to 50 percent, depending on the day, “The writing’s on the wall that it’s basically going to be down, we just don’t know how much,” he said at the time. Restaurants in Chinatowns were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic earlier than most because of a precipitous drop in tourism, growing concerns in the community over the coronavirus, and Sinophobia that also led to an alarming spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans. “At the end of the day, we’ve been dealing with this pandemic now, for us, over a year,” says Truman Lam, whose grandfather opened the restaurant. In 2017 the owners expanded with a second location on the Upper West Side, which will also remain open. Open since 1978, Jing Fong is Manhattan’s largest Chinese restaurant and one of the neighborhood’s more famous spots. The business will continue to operate its takeout and delivery business, as well as offer service on its outdoor, second-floor patio. The pork shu mai were equally as chunky as their downtown counterparts, but also had some tiny golden roe sprinkled on top, which gave them a fishy flavor.Chinatown’s dim sum palace Jing Fong will close its sprawling indoor dining room, the owners announced today. While the shrimp har gow and shrimp rice rolls looked exactly the same, there was a faint taste of garlic in both, and the rice rolls were garnished with a nest of shredded beets and carrots - not a bad addition, though not really edible. The other har gow, rice rolls, and shu mai I’d tried were available on the UWS, though. Excluded from the uptown menu are the tiny pork riblets with black bean sauce, congee ladled from a vat, honeycomb beef tripe, and platters of bronzed duck cut in pieces. In fact, the bill of fare offers about one-third of the dim sum available on carts at the mothership. ![]() Which is a shame, because chicken feet aren’t offered on the uptown menu. The shu mai were chunkier with pork than usual, but the chicken feet blew everything else away in their excellence. Apart from that, the two shrimp-bearing types were delightfully plain tasting, with the rice noodle rolls ramped up with the usual squirt of Worcestershire-flavored soy sauce. In general, the dumplings were a little more thick-skinned than I remember them. Opposite a cocktail bar, a dumpling counter curves, but most of the seating is between the two, accommodating about 70 in total.ĭowntown at lunch, I had the shrimp har gow, pork shumai, shrimp rice noodle roll, and soy-braised chicken feet (each $3.25). The interior is dramatically lit but sparsely decorated with wooden lattices that barely evoke traditional Chinatown decor. Outdoor tables flank the premises on 78 th Street. Now, surrounded by the ghosts of all those long-dead places at 78 th and Amsterdam, an outpost of Jing Fong shines. Actually, in the 1970s this neighborhood was home to many ambitious Chinese restaurants, such as Shanghai D’Or, Manchuria, Harbin Inn, and Moon Palace, famous for its fish balls, moo shu pork, and seasonal use of vegetables. So, Jing Fong plotted its second branch in an unexpected place: the Upper West Side. Nom Wah opened a pair of branches, while Tim Ho Wan debuted in the East Village, a neighborhood stocked with Chinese dumpling restaurants already. While Jing Fong has dominated Chinatown’s dim sum scene, a renaissance has taken hold outside of Chinatown, as smaller Chinese restaurants have been opening to the north, serving dim sum at night.
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